Shulamith Firestone

The rewriting of what they call traditional patriarchal structures within relationships and domestic life as nothing short of evil oppressiveness.

In her book, The Dialectic of Sex, this is 1970, Shulamith Firestone interpreted biological reproduction in traditional family structures that regarded the hierarchy as a foundational source of human oppression.

You heard me right.

That the reproductive capacities, the procreative capacities of male and female made it such that within the, what she called, sexual hierarchy, this was a foundational source of human oppression.

Women have been brainwashed to want this because society has told them that that's what they want.

Firestone literally says that love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today.

Love.

Love is in itself, oppressive.

worried about how to get pregnant possibly die or totally ignoring the point that their body's going to be wrecked and they could possibly die

this is another concept that is a staple of feminist ideology that Pregnancy itself is a violation that the baby is a parasite growing inside you.

Shulamit Firestone literally wrote pregnancy is barbaric.

Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species.

So there are certain kind of masculinist expressions of that, but I don't think it's been...

I really embrace anything like the way that technology has been by feminist thinkers like Shulamith Firestone or these xenofeminists who I think are generally higher on technology than the masculinist sphere is as a real engine of liberation from sex.

You know, we traveled a little far from the original topic, but I asked a question at the end of my little spiel about, I don't know why our culture seems to be so desperate to distance ourselves from the reality of something.

And I was just thinking about it and I realized, I mean, it's just an obvious thing.

Yeah, just maybe, you know, and that ...

I guess she's, uh, she's more radical there than someone like Shulamith Firestone, who talked about women being at the mercy of their menstrual cycles or, you know, that being something that made women vulnerable and the origin of patriarchy.

Uh, and here's-

Yeah

[laughs]

Oh no, my Shulamith Firestone.

[laughs]

How will I continue my speech without my poets, authors, icons, inspirations?

[laughs]

This book is not Greer's The Female Eunuch, but Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

This is not the Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, but- [bell rings] ... Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince.

[laughs]

She was also-

... familiarly known as Shuli.

Shuli.

There's a lot of reflection on this idea of what it means to be a giver and what it means to be a taker and what kind of person.

Where's the balance? What kind of person should you be? could you be should you aspire to be and the bottom line for me is you know would i choose to be without the entanglements in my life the enmeshments with the people i love no i would not so even if the price is that i end up doing a lot of the carrying i would rather do that than not do it at all one thing that upsets me every time i see it but i just sprung to mind is Shulamit Firestone's last days.

She died alone in her flat, wasn't found for days, was terribly depressed and ignored in her old age, didn't have a good old age.

And I just thought, my God, is that what happens when you're true to your feminist principles? Are you so isolated from reality? Is there no one who cares for you or who you care for, who will kind of make your last days enjoyable.